Educator and game design, crypto, GameFi, and NFT fan. On the panel of judges for the Independent Game Festival at Game Developers Conference (GDC).

Los Angeles
As you vibe code your next videogame, please consider playing more games. A well played game dev builds a mental library of game mechanics and innovations. Pay special attention to categories: Innovation Award and Best Design
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Trends from Independent Game Festival (IGF) 2027 I wrapped up judging games for IGF, this week and these are what I noticed. 1. Lots of horror games. I remember Chris Zukowski (game marketer) talking about the demand for horror games on @thomasbrushdev’s YouTube channel. I think we may soon have a glut of horror games. 2. Many deduction games. Following the success of last year’s IGF Honorable Mention, The Roottrees Are Dead by Evil Trout. Several deduction games follow that formula. Perhaps Evil Trout started (or popularized) a new game genre. 3.Several black and white games. I reviewed two of them previously: Mouse: PI for Hire and A Real Life Party. Are there devs making deduction, horror, or using black and white art, today?
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Nothing exciting here, all is quiet and stable. Crypto fans were expecting Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana to dominate and overthrow banks. And yet it is traditional financial institutions that are fostering crypto growth via tokenized US dollar, the stablecoins. Stablecoins means 1 coin = $1, always. Stablecoins effectively act as a US bank account to anyone with a smartphone. If you are unbanked, store money in a coffee can or you live in a country with hyperinflation, stablecoins will bring stability.
JUST IN: Visa officially launches stablecoin payments through Visa Direct, enabling near-instant global payouts using $USDC across 180+ countries.
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JUST IN: Bank for International Settlements finds crypto stablecoins directly compete with traditional bank deposits.
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Hard wallets for crypto There are issues with hardware wallets. Let me remind you what @zachxbt, crypto crime fighter said: “Hot take: All hardware wallets are complete garbage and I do not advise using them for important tasks like signing transactions or storing funds. Much better to have a separate iPhone with its only purpose being to use as your hardware wallet.” A dedicated iPhone means no additional apps in case other apps are compromised.
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Sweet dreams are made of this…
JUST IN: Chinese bride surprises her groom with a $12,000 Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU at their wedding, bringing him to tears.
Community note
The video and photos are from a 2025 Chinese wedding (not a recent "JUST IN" event). The ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 was reported as ~$3000 at the time per launch pricing and contemporary coverage, not $12000. tomshardware.com/pc-components/… videocardz.com/newz/asus-reve… en.gamegpu.com/news/zhelezo/v
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Less is More Independent Game Festival judging wrapped. I only rated 8 games this year (busy) vs ~20 last year. A common phrase from the judges about game devs, this year: "jack of many trades and master of none." I live in California and there is famous burger chain @innoutburger . In-N-Out Burger dominates because they keep the menu tiny—burgers, fries, and drinks. Staff get extremely good at cooking two things, burger and potato fries. Same principle applies to games. Several entries had solid ideas but were dragged down by too many half-baked systems. An indie dev team can't polish 10+ mechanics to a high level. The weak ones lead to pedestrian, mediocre experiences. Indie devs: resist the urge to keep adding. Pick a few core mechanics and systems and polish them until they shine. That's what separates good from excellent. I fear not the man who has polished 10,000 game mechanics once, but I fear the man who has polished one game mechanic 10,000 times. —Druce Leeroy
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Yet another breakthrough for AI—book layouts. In the tabletop RPG (TTRPG) world, formatting and layouts is the “user interface” of gamers. Game designers are not layouts experts and usability, ability to lookup rules or access tables to see dice roll results suffers greatly. Game masters (referee) routinely have multiple books open to access tables, charts and more. If AI can assist layouts of rulebooks that would bring up the quality of indie publisher to level of big publisher like Wizards of the Coast (Dungeons & Dragons). Are there other non technical breakthroughs that AI is fostering?
Claude made a 43-page player's guide for my game. 🥲
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Critical 2 hrs!
Small accounts: a post's first 2 hours decide almost everything on X. More from X's open source code: - It needs 1 like to enter the pool that reaches non-followers - Under 500 views, it gets its own new-post lane - After 2 hours, it competes with everything #gamedev #indiedev
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I’m curious what indie game devs are making in Japan 🇯🇵 Nihon.
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Game Literacy Project Verbal Combat @YujiHorii creator of the classic JRPG, Dragon Quest made a police interrogation game based on a previous work, The Portopia Serial Murder Case as an AI game dev experiment. Claude AI took 30 minutes to build and that X post stirred controversy of using AI in game development. A fan @shields_pikes noticed the post and made Kanochi, a game based on that experiment, translated in English and is ready for play. You interrogate a suspect and point out discrepancies in the suspects story to corner the suspect into confessing. This game reminds me of Burning Wheel and other modern TTRPGs where combat mechanics are applied to persuasion, seduction, intimidation and such. Take a look at this game to learn how to apply verbal combat to to your game. Pic -- a calm professional criminal, not easily rattled.
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Design notes by @shields_pikes:
心から尊敬するゲームクリエイター、堀井雄二さん(著書は全部保有)が生成AIでゲームを作った。色んな意見が出てたので、同じようなゲームをどうすれば作れるか、検証してみた。 作ったゲームはこちら shields-pikes.github.io/open… 反応で気になったのは「堀井さんだから30分で出来た」「堀井節だ」「プロンプトを知りたい」、また「こんなの簡単にできる」「課金しなくても作れる」などの意見だ。 反AI派からのリプライは、相手するだけ無駄なので無視していい。彼らへのスタンス表明は、私の一つ前の投稿に。 ここから検証。 自分は、あのゲーム内容なら一度の指示だけでポン出しで作れるだろうな、と予測した。そこで、堀井さんと同じClaude Codeでやってみた。 最初に投げたプロンプトは、リプ欄にぶら下げておいた。Claude Codeなどに投げるだけで、ほぼ同じようなものが出来上がるはず。 そして、予想通りにプロンプトのポン出しでゲームが完成した。かかった時間は合計で123分。シナリオやシステムと並行で作っていたっぽい(丸投げ放置なのでよく知らんが)、画像と動画の生成に80分くらいかかったらしい。 公開したゲームは、完成後に一切の手を加えていない。テストプレイして、直したいところも諸々見つかったが、敢えてそのまま公開した。 プレイした感覚では、わりと良く出来ているんじゃないだろうか。シナリオも悪くない。一文字も書いてないけど。そのままコピーだと芸がないと思って、堀井さんのをプレイした時に感じた改善ポイントを反発/懐柔ゲージなどのシステムに加え、シナリオにも工夫を加えてみた。三章構成にして、展開には堀井さん作品へのオマージュを入れてみた。 このくらいのゲームが、AIに月3000円くらいの課金をするだけで、誰でもポン出しで作れて、そのまま公開できる時代だということを知ってほしい。 そのためには、ClaudeならClaude Codeが使えるPro課金以上は必要。 ChatGPTでも、Plus課金以上のWorkだけでも、何も考えずに作れるはず。 事前にGithubアカウントと連携した方が後々いいけど、作り捨ての時や、コードの置き場を自分のPCにするなら、連携しなくても可能。 最後に、様々な意見について、返信してみる。 「堀井さんだから30分で出来た」 → 堀井さんじゃなくても(ゲームシステムを言語化できる人なら)できる。自分は、ゲームの仕事をしたこともあるので、言語化できたのかも。 「堀井節だ」 → たぶん、文体からして、シナリオは全部書いたりしてない。AIに依頼して書かせてる。 「プロンプトを知りたい」 → 自分のプロンプトはぶら下げておいたので見てね。たぶん堀井さんのは、もっとシンプルだと思う。 「こんなの簡単にできる」 → 正解。誰でも作れる。ただ、既存のゲームより面白くするにはゲームの仕組みを知ってることが大事。堀井さんも、今回はお試しで作った感じだったので、次はもっと本気の堀井節のゲームを作ってくれることを期待。 「課金しなくても作れる」 → 現時点では、これは反論したい。課金は必要。たぶん、これ言ってる人は、自分で作ったことがない人だと思う。 AIは、自分が想像できることなら、マジで何でも作れるので、楽しいよ。未体験の人は、ぜひ月3000円でもいいから課金して、いじってみてほしい。それで人生が変わるかもしれない。 読んでくれて、ありがとうございました。リプ欄にあるプロンプト全文も是非読んでみてね。 AIについての解説や哲学的な考察をしているアカウントなので、よかったらフォローしてってください。 @shields_pikes それでは。
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Japan 🇯🇵, 👋 small account from Los Angeles here. You make some interesting games and tool with AI. I want to take a look but you don’t translate to English. Why 🤷🤷‍♀️🤷‍♂️? I translated few mobile games to English before AI. Now with AI translation is trivial and virtually free. Please yes translate your projects to English because lots of people speak English on X.
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Software apocalypse continues … Play PS5 games without a PS5. Sony PS5 game porting kit. Run PS5 games on Windows and Linux. The kit does not contain any Sony code and the ports run without an PS5 emulators.
Sony won't like this. AnyPS5 ports PS5 executables to run natively on Windows and Linux. Not an emulator. It's at ~28K stars and 2.4K forks. how it works: * relinker → turns PS5 executables into native PC format * libraries → PS5 system libraries rebuilt from scratch * graphics → shaders recompiled to SPIR-V * reality check → so far a small 2D game is shown at 60 fps the fine print: → no emulation, no separate runtime → ships no firmware, keys or Sony code → pitched for preservation and interoperability If this scales, your PS5 library stops being tied to the box. Repo: github.com/boykopovar/AnyPS5
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Great explanation by @SyntheticBeef : AI is an above average programmer. The average programmer is average and thus code quality is become above average with AI assisted coding.
Vague post answered here. Quality of software and products has gone up because humans are slop engineers. 1% of humans engineer at Linus Torvalds’ or Steve Wozniac’s level. Ai slop code is an improvement in 99% of cases. Add onto this that “refactor my application using SOLID principles’ is so easy to type that everyone can do it. “Perform an adversarial judgement pass of the key decisions on my spec and propose recommended changes to consider using the question tool” can be copy pasted from this tweet. “Walk through every user story, imagine you are a disgruntled customer who woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. Spawn one disgruntled customer subagent for every user story and walk through the app and then produce their app store review.” The only limit to how you use ai to accelerate your work is your own imagination. An endless list of things exists that you should be prioritizing over reading the code. Every hour you spend reading the code because deep down you don’t trust your own automation is an hour you aren’t improving your product.
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Game design abilities is becoming more precious 💎as game development becomes trivial with AI assistance.
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Software apocalypses continues. Microsoft Word clone, Wordcraft is released.
WordCraft is a new open-source word processor written in Rust that aims to replicate Microsoft Word and supports .docx files. → It includes styles, track changes, comments, citations, tables of contents and mail merge → It runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, and in a web browser → An included MCP server lets AI agents such as Claude Code control the app → The developers say it is not yet at alpha stage github.com/storytold/wordcra…
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You want to use the wifi? Here you go.
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a = 7 b = 3 c = 12 if a > 5: if b > 5: print("P") elif c > 10: if a + b > c: print("S") else: print("T") else: print("F") elif c > a: print("U") else: print("P")
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